Embracing a Culture of Joy

Solutions for Creating the Learning Spaces Students Deserve

Embracing a

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Table of Contents About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 About This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Chapter 1: The Expectations of School. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 An Overemphasis on Standards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The General Language of School. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Rigor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Accountability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 College and Career Ready. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Student Achievement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Chapter 2: The Definition of Joy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Identifying Joy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Making Joy a Cultural Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Chapter 3: The Unfair Advantage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Inhibiting Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Unfair Advantage in Action. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

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Chapter 4: A Sense of Wonder. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Instant Access to Information. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Mindfulness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Wonder in Action. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Chapter 5: Play as Research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Blogging. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Embracing the Possibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Chapter 6: A Sense of Community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The Importance of Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Community Over Convenience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Intentional Communities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 School Community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Chapter 7: Gratitude. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Teaching Without Receiving Gratitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Showing Gratitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 References and Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

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About the Author Dean Shareski is the community manager for Discovery Education Canada. He taught grades 1–8 for fourteen years and spent nine years as a digital learning consultant for Prairie South School Division in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

In addition, he has taught and designed courses both at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan and at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

Dean’s blog, Ideas and Thoughts, consistently ranks among the top educational blogs. He also blogs for Tech and Learning and The Huffington Post. In 2010, he won the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Award for Outstanding Leader of the Year.

Dean has had the opportunity to speak to a variety of education audiences within the United States and Canada as well as outside North America. He believes humor and humility go a long way in supporting and advocating transformational practices in teaching and learning. More important, his efforts to promote joyful learning and working environments remain his greatest passion.

He holds a master’s degree in educational technology from the University of Saskatchewan. Dean has been married to Paula for over thirty years, and together they celebrate their four children and their families. When not teaching and sharing, you might find Dean on a golf course.

To learn more about Dean’s work, visit his blog, Ideas and Thoughts (http:// ideasandthoughts.org), or follow @shareski on Twitter.

To book Dean Shareski for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree .com.

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ix

Foreword

By William M. Ferriter

Can I ask you a tough question? How many students in your classrooms are truly satisfied with the learning spaces you have created for them? If your students reflect the national average, the answer is bound to be discouraging. Fewer than four in ten high schoolers report being engaged in their classes, and students often list boredom as the primary reason for dropping out of school (Busteed, 2013). Over 70 percent of students who don’t graduate report having lost interest by ninth grade and, worse yet, the majority of dropouts are convinced that motivation is all that prevented them from earning a diploma (Azzam, 2007).

These numbers are troubling for anyone passionate about schools. They indicate systemic failure on the part of practitioners to inspire learners and warn us of the immediate need to transform education—a warning that school leadership expert and series contributor Scott McLeod (2014) issues: If we truly care about preparing kids for life and work success— we need schools to be different. If economic success increasingly means moving away from routine cognitive work, schools need to also move in that direction. If our analog, ink-on-paper information landscapes outside of school have been superseded by environments that are digital and online and hyperconnected and mobile, our information landscapes inside of school also should reflect those shifts. If our students’ extracurricular learning opportunities often are richer and deeper than what they experience in their formal educational settings, it is time for us to catch up.

Scott is right, isn’t he? Our schools really do need to catch up if they are going to remain relevant in a world where learning is more important than schooling— and catching up can only start when we are willing to rethink everything. We need to push aside the current norms defining education—that teachers are to govern, direct, and evaluate student work; that mastering content detailed in predetermined curricula is the best indicator of student success; that assessment and remediation are more important than feedback and reflection; that the primary reason for investing in tools and technologies is to improve on existing practices. It’s time to implement notions that better reflect the complexity of the world in which we live. xi

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That is the origin of this series. It is my attempt to give a handful of the most progressive educators that I know a forum for detailing what they believe it will take to make schools different. Each book encourages readers to question their core beliefs about what teaching and learning look like in action. More important, each title provides readers with practical steps and strategies for reimagining their day-to-day practices. Here’s your challenge: no matter how unconventional ideas may seem at first, and no matter how uncomfortable they make you feel, find a way to take action. There is no other way to create the learning spaces that your students deserve.

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The Expectations of School We have to stop thinking of an education as something that is delivered to us and instead see it as something we create for ourselves.

—Stephen Downes

How would you describe the state of education today? Are schools better places for students than they were when you were a student? In some ways, they are. Great teachers are able to utilize a richer library of resources, and technology—when used effectively—creates unprecedented opportunities. In other ways, however, I wonder if we’ve lost something. Our obsession with analyzing test results and measuring learning has done its share of damage to students and teachers alike. But nostalgia is often a skewed lens to view the past through. Corporal punishment, a lack of resources, and an emphasis on lecture and memorization were not exactly ingredients for creating cultures of joy. However, in my opinion, teachers and schools faced fewer restrictions and less scrutiny from the public, making it easier to pursue joy.

This lack of accountability certainly had its downsides, but today, increased emphases on standardized tests, public reporting of school results, and media coverage have teachers and schools walking on eggshells. The slightest stray from the curriculum can attract unwelcomed attention. Specifically, schools’ overemphasis on standards and the general language of school can negatively impact culture and, therefore, learning.

© 2017 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

An Overemphasis on Standards Today, almost everything a teacher does needs to align to curriculum standards.

As a beginning teacher, I know I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it, but my 5

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decision to do fun things was based on the idea that the relationship with my students trumped the curriculum. Over the years, I’ve done many classroom activities with students because I thought they would be fun. I certainly didn’t refer to my curriculum guide to see if they fit with any particular standard or outcome. It wasn’t that they were opposing purposes but simply that relationships came first. As National Teacher of the Year Jeff Charbonneau (2014) shares, “Relationships then content. Both matter. So does the order.” However, teaching the curriculum and finding joy are not necessarily competing ideas—teachers just need to find the right balance. Even simple ideas like using games to teach concepts like multiplication tables can provide smiles and excitement while still targeting required outcomes.

Several specific moments have shaped my belief and influenced my thinking about the importance of joy.

I taught grade 1 for the first seven years of my teaching career. In 2010, my family and I moved to a new house, and as I rummaged through old class pictures, I came across a photo of the very first class I taught. One student whom I immediately thought of was Christine. Christine rarely smiled. Twenty-five years later, that was the one thing I clearly remembered. I wonder if she smiles today. I’m not worried about her reading or whether her mathematics skills are up to par. I’m not even worried about her career. I wonder if she has any joy.

In 2011, I stumbled across a lip dub, a video that combines lip synching and audio dubbing, that college students created (Vaughn, 2009). Lip dubs were still pretty new then and remain an extremely creative digital genre of storytelling. As I watched, I thought, “I want to do this with students.” My excitement over the lip dub was quickly challenged as I shared my plan with others. At the time, I worked with a small group of district-level consultants. When I showed them the video, many wondered where it fit into the curriculum. Some liked it but felt it would be better done as an extracurricular activity. A few dismissed it as a waste of time.

These reactions reminded me that our beliefs about learning and school vary greatly.

A third moment happened as I walked into an elementary school and heard an out-of-tune piano being played and students singing. It was a sound I hadn’t heard in a long while. This wasn’t a music class but just a group of students and a teacher who believed singing together was good. I remember thinking, “We don’t hear much singing in schools anymore.” Billy Joel talks about the times he’d been to England and visiting pubs, and inevitably, he’d be asked to play something on the piano. He says that music “creates community, instantly” (WNYC, 2012).

One final moment came in late 2011. I was giving a keynote at Tech Forum Texas (Shareski, 2011b), and a small part of my talk referenced joy. Overall, I felt I had done very poorly. I hadn’t given many talks at this point and struggled to create a cohesive message that I felt would be useful. I understood that joy was something powerful that resonated deep within people yet was largely ignored in education. Even as clumsily as I shared its importance, I hoped it was going to be a theme that would be shared often.

T he E x pec t ations of S chool

The General Language of School Perhaps the biggest barrier is the language we use to talk about school. Joy can be a bit like exercise. We recognize its value, but many don’t take time for it every Please enjoy this preview.

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Later that day, a second-grade teacher found me and thanked me for my message. She had recently lost her son, who was killed in Iraq, and was understandably finding it difficult. She recognized that her grief was impacting her students and didn’t think there was much joy in her classroom. She realized that needed to change.

These moments point to one idea: joy. Christine reminded me that I want students to love learning and love school. I’m not so naive to think that all students will love school all the time. But if we’re going to use phrases like lifelong learning, school has to be an enjoyable experience. While I also know that Christine’s lack of joy was likely due to many other factors, I spent five hours a day with her and was disappointed that I wasn’t successful at bringing a smile to her face very often. The fact that we live in a time of unprecedented access to content means we see new things like lip dubs and can explore them and replicate them. It’s not likely that we will see the words lip dub in any curriculum documents or standards. Yet the opportunity to play and make things with new media should certainly be seen as valuable. Doing things together, like creating videos or singing, has the underlying ability to build community and connectedness. Building community in schools and classrooms needs to move from a platitude to something intentional.

With the emphasis on standards and sticking to the curriculum, schools have become riddled with specific terminology about student achievement—perhaps the wrong words. This terminology almost always refers to test scores and grades and, more specifically, improving test scores and grades. However, improvement almost always begins with culture. Culture has become a buzzword in education and rightly so, but like with lifelong learning, school culture has to be an enjoyable experience.

As Peter Drucker says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” (as cited in Rick, 2014).

This idea suggests that people’s beliefs and expectations about an organization are much more powerful than any stated plan or mission statement. I would suggest it also implies that behaviors and attitudes will do more to influence success than your stated plans. Creating a culture of joy, or anything for that matter, requires both intention and commitment. The great thing about culture is, as Tony Hsieh (2009) of Zappos says, “If you get the culture right, most of the other stuff . . . will happen naturally on its own.”

So we might say that joy hasn’t really gone away—when it comes to schools, it’s never really been there. But that's debatable. That said, joy and learning have always gotten along. The good news is that there is a shift to move away from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning. However, I’m still not seeing an acknowledgment of and a focus on the beauty and joy of learning.

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8

Rigor Of late, there is a big movement toward rigor. This interesting word deserves a closer look. If you look the word up in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, you’ll find the following definitions: 1a (1): harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment: severity (2): the quality of being unyielding or inflexible: strictness (3): severity of life: austerity b: an act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty 2: a tremor caused by a chill 3: a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable; especially: extremity of cold

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day. According to Arja-Sisko Holappa, a counselor for the Finnish National Board of Education, there’s an old Finnish saying that’s fitting for education: “Those things you learn without joy you will forget easily” (as cited in Walker, 2015).

Language and words matter. Education is full of jargon that gets used to such a degree that we either dilute or modify its meaning, at which point we are unaware of its often deleterious impact. For years, students have been asking the age-old question, “Why do we have to learn this?” The typical reply is often, “You’ll need it for the next grade.” While this answer is true, it’s another way in which we advance the bureaucracy of education and dismiss the notion that learning for the sake of learning is a joyful and beautiful experience. When we think about learning, it shouldn’t bring fear or dread but joy and excitement.

In The Book of Learning and Forgetting, Frank Smith (1998) provides a clear argument that learning is something we all do naturally. The questions become, Are we learning what is important, acceptable, and useful? Are we exploring new things that challenge us and help us grow as learners and humans? This is where the role of school hopes to provide guidance. Curriculum is essentially an arbitrary guide of skills and knowledge. Others decide what’s important and charge teachers with ensuring students learn it. While it’s easy to argue whether everything in school is necessary, it’s safe to say there is plenty that truly is important for students to know. Yet somehow, educators have filed much of their teaching under it’s our job rather than this is fascinating. This culture permeates our schools, which affirms for students that school is boring. It has become something that is done to them rather than something they perceive as useful and interesting.

It’s no wonder that students continue to see school as onerous when many of the words we use elicit images of drudgery. These words and phrases create unnecessary and harmful stereotypes that I’m not sure we always recognize. Many of these are impacting students, and just as many create a less-than-desired work environment for our teachers. Let’s take a look at just a few.

T he E x pec t ations of S chool

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4: strict precision : exactness <logical rigor> 5a obsolete: rigidity, stiffness b: rigidness or torpor of organs or tissue that prevents response to stimuli

I struggle to find a definition that I would feel comfortable ascribing to learning. Yet the word has taken over in many districts as a point of pride. Many schools have built their mission statements around this term and use every opportunity to brag about the rigor in their schools. I can understand what people would like the word to mean, but I don’t know why we would choose that word.

Alfie Kohn (2004) writes about it in “Feel-Bad Education: The Cult of Rigor and the Loss of Joy.” In it, he asks a question from educational researcher and theorist John I. Goodlad—“Why are our schools not places of joy?”—and goes on to discuss people’s affection with rigor (Kohn, 2004). The belief seems to be that unless learning is hard, it’s not worth doing. I don’t know why we’ve associated hard with important, but this is clearly a dominant belief. After all, we might be embarrassed if people thought of school as easy. Instead, we make every effort to announce our schools as rigorous. Teachers often brag about how difficult their courses are as if that alone makes them valuable. Memorizing a phone book would be hard, and, dare I say, rigorous, but not nearly as meaningful as learning to play a game with others in gym class. Along those same lines, because classes like gym and art are often more enjoyable, they’re seen as less valuable. Similarly, a class like trigonometry is a challenge for many and consequently viewed as more important in our hierarchy of subjects. I would argue the majority of the things I’ve learned in life have been very pleasurable and a natural consequence of being in a healthy learning environment exploring something I was interested in. Learning isn’t best described as rigorous. Learning is when we desire to understand and create. Certainly learning can be challenging, but the goal of learning shouldn’t be difficulty. We want students to be able to handle difficulties and struggles, but this becomes a much more palatable experience when the work is meaningful. The use of the word rigor sets a tone for schools. It’s not a word that inspires learning but one that evokes a strict and narrow view of learning. Kohn (2004) also states, “I’m appearing to accept an odious premise—namely, that joy must be justified as a means to the end of better academic performance. Not so: It’s an end in itself.”

I’m not suggesting we don’t embrace difficult, challenging work. I’m not even suggesting we don’t look for it. But we don’t need to lead with it. If the work we do with students is meaningful and important, I don’t think we’ll want to describe it or label it as rigorous. Challenging, complex, meaningful, and purposeful are all better ways to describe learning.

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c: rigor mortis (Rigor, n.d.)

Pl ea s eenj oyt hi spr e v i e w.

Cl i c kher et opur c ha s e t hef ul l v er s i on.